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Archive of Ported EVO Plug-ins (REZ)

by: EVO Community

Topics: Escape Velocity, Plugins, Escape Velocity Override, EVC, EVO, Macintosh

Item Size: 269.4M

Welcome to my archive. Inside you will find plugins for EV Override that have been converted using SpacePort into files EV Nova can understand. They were further converted to .rez files in order to be more easily compressed and shared online. These are immediately compatible with EV Nova for Windows and WineNova, and can be converted back to Mac format if you are using EV Nova for Mac.

Please note the plugins here are not fully debugged, and installing them doesn't guarantee a stable gameplay experience without extensive debugging needed. Some of these plugins may not launch at all at first, more on that in a bit.

This archive will also not be used for finished ports, it is a resource for making them.

Installation:

You will need a functioning copy of EV Nova to use these plugins. You will also need a port of EV Override for the base Nova Files folder, and you will install files from this archive into the "Plug-ins" or "Nova Plug-ins" folder.

Troubleshooting:

These are some of the most common issues you may encounter:

- Launch: Plugins may crash on launch. The reasons why can vary widely. Best bet is to create a debuglog.txt file and put it in the same folder you are launching from, or reference the NovaLog generated by WineNova if using that. Work your way through the issues reported until the plugin launches successfully, then continue referencing debug output to find and fix other issues. Common issues may include weapons not using the correct ammo, planets or missions not setting up correctly, etc.

- Gameplay speed: EV Override allowed the user to change the overall game speed in the game settings. Nova doesn't have this capability. This means that any port to Nova at best will mimic one speed setting, so a port that feels true to one person's experience of the original may feel too fast or too slow for someone else.

- Missions: Nova has a few quirks with how it handles specific types of missions. For example if multiple missions are available in a bar at the same time, Nova will skip over the second mission in the queue if the first one was accepted. This will break missions that relied on one mission to set up stuff for the second, or if a mission is used as introductory dialogue into the second mission, the second mission not appearing breaks the overall experience. There are multiple possible ways to fix something like this. One is to put a "dummy" mission second in the queue, another is to set up the first mission so accepting it automatically starts the second. This can cause dialog boxes for text to appear in an unintuitive order, but that can be worked around.

- Launch music: SpacePort exports the snd resource containing launch music as a .aiff file. Nova cannot read this, it will need to be converted to mp3. It is also recommended to use a constant bit rate (CBR) encoding. 160kbps seems to consistently work well.

- Pictures: A lot of the plugins I converted were missing pictures resources, or they were corrupted. Not much can be done, other than hoping to find the same images intact elsewhere.

- Sprites: SpacePort only converts PICTs to RLeD if a spin resource referencing the sprite and mask images is found in the same plugin file containing the PICT resources. Plugins that modified the graphics without providing a replacement spin resource or plugins that had the spin resources in a separate file do not convert properly in SpacePort unless manually edited first. I fixed most of them as I caught them, but I likely missed some.

- Scan masks: SpacePort doesn't transfer scan mask data into outfits or missions. Those will need to be fixed manually. The logging feature in SpacePort apparently notes these instances, but early in the conversion process I chose to disable logging because the myriad of issues that would cause SpacePort to fail created a lot of clutter to sort through. Sorry for any inconvenience this caused, but you can still reference the original data or infer what missions and outfits should have scan masks based on context.

Note: "The Frozen Heart" was excluded due to having already been ported, and turning out to be difficult to convert anyway.